In Bruges

At one level Bruges looked like it does in all of the photos and films.

Exclusive opportunity for Places and Spaces readers!

By "exclusive" I mean "open to anyone including".

Mapping Contest and food

The full results are out from the NJ DEP map contest. And, you can look at the winners online. One of the winners that I found interesting was the DVRPC map examining the food supply in the greater Philly area. 

Liège Guillemins TGV Station by Calatrava

I was fortunate enough to transfer trains in Liege, where Santiago Calatrava has designed a large train station. I wish I had explored the station more, but I certainly saw enough during my brief stay to see why this is a true architectural landmark. I wish I had realized I was going there so I could have thought more about the photos I was taking.












And, while walking down the platform I ran into Rob Hewitt from Celmson. Small world.

Add a line to your resume

Volunteer for something like City of Water Day.

Duisburg: Details and Fun

Part of the amazing thing thing about Emscher Park, or Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, is that while the park is so large, it is filled with little details. Latz and Latz seemed especially able to turn even a small lip of a wall or a hidden space into something special.

They even turned some spare bricks into a moss garden.

The indoor spaces are just as lively and memorable, and certainly quite usable.

And the park turns bleak industrial walls and spaces into play areas and climbing walls.

"individuals of dissimilar temperaments"

“Unlike McHarg, most landscape architects have neither the knowledge nor the interest to embrace the entire scope of the discipline – the shaping of the landscape from garden to region – within their practices and theories. The synthesis forged by McHarg and others has tended to dissolve, not because of inevitable strains imposed by professional practice and the demands of specific projects, but because the study and practice of the two ends of the spectrum – garden design and regional planning – have tended to attract individuals of dissimilar temperaments who borrow methods and theories from disparate disciplines rather than generating them from within the core knowledge and actions of landscape architects.”

- Anne Whiston Spirn

Spirn, A. W., 2000. “Ian McHarg, Landscape Architecture, and Environmentalism: Ideas and Methods In Context” in Environmentalism in landscape architecture.

Duisburg: The Big Picture

Although I had seen lots of photos of Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord, I had never quite cognized its grand scale. So I doubt my photos will change it for our dear readers. But, today's part 2 on the park offers photos that mostly show large areas, especially from the viewing areas atop the blast furnace.

Congratulations to the Class of 2010

Congratulations to the Class of 2010!  Even those of you whose photos were too blurry to include.

Urban SOS

While at CELA I heard a fair amount about the difficulty for students to find jobs and summer internships. Making the most of the unfilled time is important. AECOM is holding a student design competition that could help. The Urban SOS program offers a $20,000 prize for site redevelopment proposals in Phoenix, Arizona, United States; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Beijing, China; Port au Prince, Haiti; Istanbul, Turkey; São Paulo, Brazil; Johannesburg, South Africa. I suspect that Port au Prince will be a popular site.

Duisburg: Tour

One of the highlights of attending CELA 2010 was a visit to Germany's Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (mapped).This is an old industrial site that has been converted into a pretty amazing park.  The design by Latz + Partner is both an icon of brownfields redevelopment and contemporary landscape architecture. 

Our tour was led by Peter and Anneliese Latz. Here is a picture of Anneliese talking to our group.

The facilities here were huge.  I have sen plenty of photos before, but never realized just how large the structures themselves were.  Below you can see the group walking through a cut in one of the walls. 

The design capitalizes on the spaces and forms of the existing structures and uses them as inspiration for creating exceptional new spaces for visitors to experience.

The park is large enough that you have to explore for quite a while. And the buildings are large enough that at any moment, you usually don't have a good view of the site.

Even the settling pits that were cleaned up (above) have been turned into spaces for humans. The others (below) are planted up for viewing and bioremediation.

This is the first of 3 photosets.

Robert Moses redux?

AASHTO wants to build more highways into our cities.

High school stormwater project

Pascack High School students are learning about watershed protection by working with a variety of groups (including Rutgers' Water Resources Program) to build a stormwater conservation garden.

We wanted to do meaningful things

“We landscape architects had all come to GSD to work on computers for land-planning applications – not to learn FORTRAN programming. We wanted to do meaningful things, and our inability to conquer programming was inhibiting our ability to master the utility and power of the technology. We revolted. We told Charles Harris, the chair of landscape architecture that we wouldn’t pay our tuition unless the software became friendly.”

- Lawrie Jordan

Niemann, B. J., and S. Niemann, 1994. “Revolutionaries in Action: Nick Faust, Lawrie Jordan Bruce Rado, and Steve Sperry,” GIS Innovators column, Geo Info Systems, 4:2 (February) 53-57.

‘shrub it up buggey’

“What struck me immediately was that this computer thing was not the same old vanilla stuff. It was much more than the ‘shrub it up buggey’ we were being taught at Georgia.”

- Lawrie Jordan

Niemann, B. J., and S. Niemann, 1994. “Revolutionaries in Action: Nick Faust, Lawrie Jordan Bruce Rado, and Steve Sperry,” GIS Innovators column, Geo Info Systems, 4:2 (February) 53-57.

Next Generation bricks

It seems like we only just had Susan Senazy here talking about past years' Next Generation winners, but I see that Metropolis has announced this year's awards.  The winner is a Ginger Krieg Dosier, whose Biomanufactured Brick proposal "has the potential to reduce worldwide CO2 emissions by millions of tons a year". I like the Lousiana sand bags made from bottles, too.

"each took away their own new ideas"

"However, the first Harvard studio – the Delmarva studio – has not been given the credit it deserves. This studio was insignificant in terms of actual content, but its influence lay in the stimulation of ideas in its visiting faculty. Don Belcher of Cornell, Phil Lewis of Wisconsin, Ian McHarg of Pennsylvania and Angus Hills of Canada all participated in this studio, and each took away their own new ideas about the potential of digital databases for analyzing geographic data."

- David Sinton

Sinton, D. 1991. “Reflections on 25 years of GIS.” GIS World. Special insert.

A bunch of winners

The NJ DEP Mapping Contest was conducted recently and we are proud to announce some winners from Rutgers.

One of our Environmental Planning students, Joe Tricarico, won 1st Place in Best Instructional Presentation for his mapping of bike and pedestrian dangers in Newark.


The students from the Fall Junior studio (11:550:331) were represented by Hany Hanafy.  For their map about Cape May County they won:

• 1st Place for Best Software Integration and
• 2nd Place for Newbie of the Year

Congrats them all!

"tradition of Ian McHarg, Phil Lewis and Warren Manning"

"Obviously, one problem was to deal with more than one map, right? What’s the topology like when you have more than one map? Well, you’ve got to overlay them. We knew that was the trick because why else did Sinton have to use GRID as opposed to SYMAP? It’s because the students in the Landscape Architecture tradition of Ian McHarg, Phil Lewis and Warren Manning wanted to overlay and interact different maps. Sinton used GRID to integrate the sources."

- Nicholas Chrisman

Niemann, B. J., and S. Niemann, 1994. “Nicholas Chrisman: Innovation with Affect – Part Two,” GIS Innovators column, Geo Info Systems, 4:9 (September) 46-52.

Change of Grade Request

Since this is the time when people ask about getting their grades changed, it also seems like the perfect time to post a response: Now that the final grades are in how do I get mine improved?

"lost its social purpose"

“In the late ‘70s the profession rolled over and played dead for the second time – just like when it rolled over in the Roaring Twenties and lost its social purpose when city planning emerged as a separate discipline and profession. When Peter Walker and his associates at SWA East reinstated the belief that ‘landscape architecture must finally be judges as a form of fine art’ and promoted designs such as Martha Schwartz’s now-famous ‘Back Bay Bagel Garden,” that was the final death knell for GIS in landscape architecture at Harvard.”

- Steve Sperry

Niemann, B. J., and S. Niemann, 1994. “Revolutionaries in Action: Nick Faust, Lawrie Jordan Bruce Rado, and Steve Sperry,” GIS Innovators column, Geo Info Systems, 4:2 (February) 53-57.

Internship at ASLA

For those who like DC, ASLA has two internships this summer.

Two jobs, one city

Two job opportunities with the City of San Antonio Office of Environmental Policy have been posted.  The positions, a Planner and GIS Analyst, are temporary two-year positions funded through a grant that will support the development and promotion of "active transportation" options through the San Antonio Bikes program. A
snapshot of recent program initiatives can be found on the San Antonio Bikes Facebook fan page.  Information about the Office of Environmental Policy is available at www.sanantonio.gov/oep.

Applications will be accepted through May 19.  To apply, go to: http://www.sanantonio.gov/hr/jobs/main_jobs.asp.  Scroll down to find the Planner (Temporary) and GIS Analyst (Temporary) - Non Departmental - listings.

Vertigo

The NY Times reports this morning on how vertical gardens are becoming more common.

a reading reminder

Over the last few weeks in class we've talked repeatedly about Andrew Rice's recent piece in the Times Sunday Magazine called "Property Lines - A Stake in the Sand."  You might want to peek at it again if you have forgotten the basic ideas.

Hometown boy makes good

Newark is working with architect Richard Meier, a native of the Brick City, to build a special complex called Teacher's Village.  It will provide affordable housing to, among others, teachers.  Nicolai Ourousoff of the NY Times describes how it will connect with two charter schools and endeavor to transform an existing neighborhood. If I correctly read the map, it is a brownfield redevelopment of an old sewing machine factory.

Saying goodbye to scholarships

The latest item on the budget chopping block is the $1.8 million in scholarships for Bloustein scholars here at Rutgers.

Andres Duany

PlaNetizen (a RotD) reports on Andres Duany's new cause.

Get to know...

• The NJ Office of Smart Growth at DCA
• Brownfields and Land Revitalization at US EPA
• US Interior
• US Census Bureau at Commerce

Coast-to-coast licensure

The 50th state has finally passed a licensure law!  Thanks Vermont.

Scale bars

Discussions of scale bars never seem to get old.

Modeling movies

Andy at Digital Urban has posted 5 movies that explore agent movement in different rule-based landscape settings.

Saving money with remote sensing?

Could Greece really save $30 billion per year by looking for tax cheats on air photos and satellite images?  The NY Times seems to think so.

Clare Sabatini and eminent domain

Here is the obituary for Clare Sabatini, of Atlantic City, who successfully fought against eminent domain and Donald Trump.